Chronicles of New York

By Christina Bryza

Jackhammers would have been better—loud noises, he could sleep through. For several mornings now, jackhammers had assaulted his eardrums beginning at six a.m., and he was almost used to them. But the persistent buzz of his cell phone at eleven thirty p.m. on a Friday night successfully penetrated his haze of near sleep. The vibration of plastic against night stand was not loud enough to ignore.

He wasn’t sure the call was from Janine, but he knew it probably was. He reasoned as clearly as he could, his mind clouded by the five milligrams of Vicodin he’d swallowed an hour ago. Five milligrams wasn’t much, not by any addict’s standards, but then, he wasn’t an addict. Just a man who was done feeling for the day and whose friend had undergone dental surgery and didn’t like painkillers. At most he took one pill a week on Friday nights when he was alone, or wanted to be.

Last Friday night Janine had come over unexpectedly. Not exactly uninvited, but the idea hadn’t been his either. So he hadn’t felt too bad about surreptitiously ingesting a pill while she’d been in the bathroom. She’d stayed over that night too, which had been okay. He liked a warm body next to him in bed; it could even be soothing if it was the right person keeping him company. Janine probably wasn’t right, but she wasn’t necessarily wrong, and so it had been okay for her to sleep over.

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This entry was posted by Willow on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 4:21 pm. It is filed under Guest Contributors and has these tags: career, daily life, diner, drinking, fiction, food, frustration, life, manhattan, new york city, privacy, sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.